RadioFreeLiberal.com

........The "Untitled Detroit Project" is officially described as a true crime drama set against the backdrop of the five days of civil unrest that devastated the city in the summer of 1967. Kathryn Bigelow is directing a screenplay by Mark Boal. They're the Oscar-winning team behind 2008's "The Hurt Locker" and 2012's "Zero Dark Thirty.".......

...........While the specific focus of the piece has yet to be revealed, the Freep reported that it may touch on violence at the Algiers Motel, where members of the Detroit Police Department, Michigan State Police and Michigan Army National Guard killed three black men and brutally beat up nine other individuals (two white women and seven black men) after a report indicated that a gunman has been seen around the motel. The police officers charged with the deaths of the three civilians were acquitted...............

Kathryn Bigelow Directed havent seen hurt locker or zero dark thirty but liked the widow maker point break and near dark

Detroit riot movie will film in Motor City this week

With the 1967 riot movie "Detroit" from director Kathryn Bigelow set to open Aug. 4, another major film on the struggle for racial justice in the Motor City is in the works.

"Arc of Justice" will star David Oyelowo as Ossian Sweet, according to the Hollywood Reporter. The character is based on the real-life defendant in an 1925 murder trial that was an important chapter in the civil rights movement.

Sweet was an African-American doctor who was threatened by an angry white mob after attempting to move into a house on Garland Avenue in a white neighborhood. Shots were fired, and one white man in the mob was killed........

.............The movie will be based on the 2004 National Book Award nonfiction winner "Arc of Justice: A Saga of Race, Civil Rights and Murder in the Jazz Age." It's a gripping historical account of the Sweet trial by author Kevin Boyle, who's written extensively on topics related to his hometown of Detroit..............

......Boyd, the prolific and respected author of 23 books now offers America “Black Detroit: A People’s History of Self-Determination," (Amistad) a thorough, chronological, stunningly detailed look at Detroit’s incarnation and development through the eyes of those ignored, marginalized or unheralded because of color.

He completes us, offering the missing half of a narrative, the black half, that is as important to the city’s tale as the French founders and the business titans whose names get etched in stone.

“It’s important at this time in the city’s history because Detroit has a reputation out there following the bankruptcy,” he said. “I was interviewed the other day, and the guy went straight to (former mayor) Kwame Kilpatrick. That’s what happens often in our culture. The negative stuff gains resonance and lasts a lot longer than the positive.

“Detroit is people, and people need to look at the people perspective,” he said. “There’s a rich tradition and a rich history that a lot of people need to know that comes from self-determination. There was slavery right here in Detroit! People need to know that! At one time, New York City had more slaves than the Carolinas. People need to know that. When I say in the subtitle that it was about self-determination, that is the blueprint right there, what happens from slavery to the various restrictive covenants to the jobs when we had the lowest paid and most dangerous jobs in the foundries and factories and built up this tremendous black middle class.”

Boyd, who grew up in Detroit and now lives in Harlem, N.Y., recalls arriving as a 4-year-old, and the back-breaking work his mother did to take care of the family. His family still lives here.

“When I was in Detroit, I moved from one neighborhood to the other, but I would take all those memories with me from place to place, from Black Bottom to Eight Mile Road,” he writes.

His book is filled with memories from people who aren’t the usual suspects, but should be. From the introduction through the ..............

new trailer

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Another one that looks quite interesting

with the actor who played MLK in Selma but different director


David Oyelowo to star in movie about historic Detroit civil rights case

good column by Rochelle Riley,looking forward to this one.

Book on black Detroit gives readers missing narrative of the city's history

An often repeated tale in the city’s white suburbs is that Detroit was a great, model city ― and then all those black people burned the city down in 1967 and whites had to leave. Is this accurate?

Harvey Ovshinsky: That is such bullshit. … It makes white people feel better ― and justified ― about leaving. It didn’t help. It was the nail in the coffin. But that coffin was being crafted long before the riots. The riots just made it official, and easy for people to say, “See? I told you so.”


Charles Simmons: Thomas Sugrue explains a lot of it [in his book The Origins of the Urban Crisis]. The structure of the economy going back really to the early 1900s, particularly after World War II, with the highway administration building the highways and the housing administration building the suburbs ― that allowed and encouraged segregated housing. And then the urban renewal just moved us around and took our property and businesses.

Reggie Carter: What happens is oftentimes when ..........

........“I remember the stories my dad told me as a young man growing up in Detroit,” said the Detroit native who now oversees 2,430 sworn members of the Detroit Police Department. “One story he told me … was when he was stopped by the Big 4 (a revolving rogue unit of cops notorious for terrorizing black residents).

“He was in a pool hall, and he had been honorably discharged from the Army, and they pushed him around. Is that how you treat a veteran? It’s almost akin to the story of how the riots started at the blind pig, a party being given for two returning veterans who had served in Vietnam.

“So, I remember that I didn’t have a real love growing up for the police,” he said.

But 10 years later, that 10-year-old became a Detroit police officer and learned how racist some fellow officers were on his first day on the job.

“I remember… getting in the car, prepared for our night shift,” he recalled. “Twenty-five years on the job, he just looked at me and let me know that night that he was driving, and I was a passenger. He looked at me and said, 'You do one thing: Just be black. Don’t talk to me. You’re not going to touch this radio, and you’re not going to drive this car.'”

That was the DPD, whose ranks included officers whose treatment of black residents was so horrific and well-known that black people knew to avoid certain blocks and the Big 4.

Yes, Detroit was a blueprint for how to discriminate against black folks in housing, in schools, in jobs — with an assist from local, state and federal governments. But thousands of complaints of police abuse, kept meticulously by activists and victims since the 1920s and ignored for decades — were what thousands of people rebelled against for five days and nights with an anger that ruined their neighborhoods and others, but made sure people would never forget.........

James Craig had no love for police in 1967 — now he's Detroit's chief




if there was twitter in 1967
Live-tweeting the #Detroit67 riots

Yesterday was the 50 year anniversary, I read.

1942: More than 1,000 white people gathered at Ryan and Nevada on Feb. 28 to protest a black family moving into the newly built Sojourner Truth housing project. Police battled protesters for several hours. There were no deaths, but dozens of injuries.

I can't imagine a more clear description of this country's ongoing struggle with race than these words, written by former Free Press reporter Philip Meyer in a 1968 Nieman Reports magazine: "Most white Americans don’t feel like racists. Most of us believe in the basic brotherhood of man, and therefore we can’t be racists. Can we?

"Closer inspection of the Riot Commission report," a federal examination of uprisings the year before in a handful of American cities, "shows that we can. The racism it talks about is a passive thing, a state of mind that has permitted the structure and institutions of our society to grow and adapt to the needs of the white middle class while bypassing the Negro. This is the heart of its argument: that good feeling and talk of brotherhood is not enough. There must be structural and institutional change."

And it is maddening to realize how little has changed in the 49 years since Meyer penned that call to action.

Fifty years ago, Meyer was fresh off a year at Harvard University and a fellowship at the Neiman Foundation, where he'd studied how the techniques of .............

........But those who were surprised by Detroit’s uprising were blind to the city’s long and troubled history of racial and economic inequality. In the preceding quarter century, whites had vandalized the homes of more than two hundred African-American families who were the first or second to move into formerly all-white neighborhoods. In a massive grassroots movement, white homeowners formed hundreds of neighborhood organizations with the sole purpose of keeping their neighborhoods racially “pure.” Detroit ranked near the top of the nation’s most racially segregated cities.

The gap between black and white incomes in Detroit remained substantial throughout the 1960s. About 19% of Detroit’s African-American population lived beneath the poverty line. As was the case in other large American cities, Detroit’s neighborhoods and schools were highly segregated. Police-community relations in the Motor City were poisonous, the result of decades of systematic harassment of African-American civilians and countless incidents of police violence against blacks suspected of committing a crime.......

Fifty years ago, Detroit burned. The new Detroit is making the same mistakes.


...........Way back in July of 1967, just before that infamous evening when Detroit went up in flames, city boosters had been feeling pretty optimistic about the Motor City’s future. Detroit, then the nation’s fifth-largest city, was a metropolis that epitomized all that postwar America had to offer. Home to the Big Three automakers, it boasted higher-paying jobs for working people than many other cities. The Federal Housing Administration helped its residents enjoy unusually high rates of homeownership. Charismatic leaders — from the forward-thinking liberal Mayor Jerome Cavanagh to the union icon Walter Reuther to ambitious entrepreneurs like the junior Henry Ford — all worked together to keep the wheels of the Motor City turning smoothly and unceasingly toward a more prosperous future.

Notably, Detroit was also the apple of Washington’s eye. As President Lyndon Johnson and officials in the federal Office of Economic Opportunity noted in 1965, Detroit was a shining example of their bold new Model Cities program.

And yet, this was not the city that many Detroiters actually experienced.

In fact, the last time the Motor City glistened, the realities of racial and class inequality contradicted the celebratory image its boosters were touting. High-paying union jobs at Ford, GM and Chrysler mostly benefited white workers — the median income of whites in the city was 66 percent higher than that of blacks...........

local historian and professor on the blind spot then and now to injustice and cruelty, while it remains mostly invisible the effects are very deeply felt and consequential as well.

The new Detroit’s fatal flaw

[url]Fifty years ago, Detroit burned. The new Detroit is making the same mistakes.


...........Way back in July of 1967, just before that infamous evening when Detroit went up in flames, city boosters had been feeling pretty optimistic about the Motor City’s future. Detroit, then the nation’s fifth-largest city, was a metropolis that epitomized all that postwar America had to offer. Home to the Big Three automakers, it boasted higher-paying jobs for working people than many other cities. The Federal Housing Administration helped its residents enjoy unusually high rates of homeownership. Charismatic leaders — from the forward-thinking liberal Mayor Jerome Cavanagh to the union icon Walter Reuther to ambitious entrepreneurs like the junior Henry Ford — all worked together to keep the wheels of the Motor City turning smoothly and unceasingly toward a more prosperous future.

Notably, Detroit was also the apple of Washington’s eye. As President Lyndon Johnson and officials in the federal Office of Economic Opportunity noted in 1965, Detroit was a shining example of their bold new Model Cities program.

And yet, this was not the city that many Detroiters actually experienced.

In fact, the last time the Motor City glistened, the realities of racial and class inequality contradicted the celebratory image its boosters were touting. High-paying union jobs at Ford, GM and Chrysler mostly benefited white workers — the median income of whites in the city was 66 percent higher than that of blacks...........[/url]

The supposed blindness is willful, and deliberate.

Did you see it yet, MC?? I just got home from seeinh it.

I'd love to know what you think of it I didn't read much about it because I knew I'd be seeing it, so I did not know it was going to focus on what it focused on. I thought it was pretty good or at the very least, quitte timely.

The thing that the cons really detest the most about BLM is not the stopped traffic or even the protests themselves, it's the critiques that reference things like the Kerner Commission report.

50 years later, the same issues persist at every turn. The reasons why are more deliberate and entrenched as ever.

...............Fifty years later, we are forced to ask whether we have seen fundamental change. The obvious answer is: of course. But any celebration of progress is tempered by the ever-growing list of unarmed civilians who are killed in police-involved shootings. While police forces are more diverse than in 1967, we still see the impact of implicit bias when young black men are shot for innocent conduct. Consequently, some of the same sense of frustration found in the streets of 1967 Detroit is still present in cities across the nation.

For that reason, I continue to pursue police accountability and criminal justice reform. In consultation with law enforcement, the civil rights advocacy community and the Department of Justice, I have introduced two major legislative initiatives that form the core of the police practices effort: the End Racial Profiling Act and the Law Enforcement Trust and Integrity Act. Taken together, these bills are designed to control and provide guidance for routine civilian-police encounters that form the basis for so many tragic policing incidents.

Given the nation’s current political climate — where President Donald Trump finds it appropriate to casually call for police brutality in a recent speech — a reflection of what happened in Detroit is timely and may help shed light on the challenges facing minority communities and the police as we try to address a continuing cycle of inequality across the nation. By viewing current events through the lens of history, we must find the courage to recommit ourselves to ending the cycle of poverty, poor education and violence that still plagues our communities.

John Conyers represents Michigan's 13th District in the U.S. House of Representatives.

...........The new machines came about because of irregularities during last year’s presidential election recount and as a commission appointed by the president looks into questions of voter integrity across the country.

Detroit is the biggest of 60 cities that switched to the new voting machines. According to a Free Press article, 45 counties will have the new equipment by November. Tuesday’s primary election produced a small turnover, but the new machines posed no issues..............

.........Detroit kicked off primary election day this morning with a light turnout marked by a few minor snafus at polling places.

"It has been lighter than expected,'' said Daniel Baxter, deputy clerk for the city of Detroit. "We expected it to be between 10 and 15% and right now it's about 2.1% as of 11 o'clock. We don't anticipate it getting any better this afternoon and into the evening.''

One polling place just north of Midtown ended up opening late.

And at another location in southwest Detroit, an elevator was out of service — meaning voters had to climb the stairs to cast their ballots.

At Gee Edmonson Academy on Canfield south of Forest, polls were closed for the first 80 minutes of voting Tuesday morning after a janitor couldn't find the key to unlock the equipment.

Workers arrived at the school at 5:45 a.m., and the problems started there.

“We got here and the custodian let us in the building,’’ said A. Jones, a precinct supervisor. “Once we got in, the equipment was locked up in the computer room. ... I called the election commission and let them know what was going on, and somebody was on their way a little after 7. We got the equipment at 7:40 and we were able to set up.

“We processed our first voter at this station at 8:20.’’

With the voting booths and ballots under lock and key, some potential voters went away without casting a ballot............

t's a cliché: "A tale of two Detroits." The stark disparities between Detroit's increasingly gleaming downtown and crumbling neighborhoods is well-known, well-documented, and clear to anyone with eyeballs who has ever set foot in the city before. There are plenty of other well-documented names for the phenomenon — like "Gilbertville," or "The 7.2," as in the number of square miles of downtown and Midtown that have seen investments in recent years. (Of course, there are pockets of the city beyond this area that are also doing well.)


To the point: "Two Detroits" is a thing. And it was undoubtedly the theme of Detroit's mayoral primary campaign season, seized in particular by Coleman Young II, the top contender against incumbent Mayor Mike Duggan in November.

"[40 percent] of the city is living in poverty," Young told us. "Whatever [city officials] are trying to turn is clearly not working for almost half the city." When asked about Detroit's "turnaround," the dozen other candidates who were vying for Duggan's job had similar things to say.........